Hm. My thoughts at this stage are:
Way back at the dawn of time, the Precursors had a major, extremely powerful intragalactic empire. They were not, however, sufficiently powerful to feel themselves secure against all known or plausible threats, and so conducted extensive research into new weapons and technologies.
After playing around with robotics and such - which didn't work out just because they were Really Alien and couldn't conceptualize the problem in a way that could be solved cost-effectively, they started tinkering around with genetic engineering, trying to create a non-sapient soldier race who could nevertheless be smart enough to make effective warriors.
And it seemed to work, so they started cloning and outfitting defensive armies to do their fighting for them.
The reason they based their work off of humans was simple: It was more efficient to start with a sapient and work back than the other way around, and out of all the sapient races they had found, we hairless apes from Planet Earth had the simplest genetics - making us the best subjects for manipulation.
Then they ran into what they'd been afraid of all along. The Others had taken an entirely different approach to their military planning than the Precursors - they'd gone and developed psi as a science (pardon the pun).
If it hadn't turned out that the Precursors had been wrong about the intelligence of their Zentraedi minons - they were quite sapient, just so well-conditioned they usually didn't act it - then the Others could have taken control of their entire military and won handily. Instead, they only grabbed about half the fleet.
True to form, the Precursors looked at the problem and tried to engineer a life-form to solve it - in this case, by going back to their previous guinea pigs and trying to give them psi powers comperable to those they had observed the Others using to steal their troops... They didn't know about the amplifiers the Others were using, and in fact generally had no fucking clue what they were doing, but somehow they managed to get a 'working model' anyway. She wasn't near as strong as they'd have liked, but she was better than nothing, so they started a batch of clones at the research station and...
Then things got real ugly. When the dust had mostly settled, the galaxy looked rather different - the Precursors and the Others had wiped each other out entirely, and there were random fragments of Zentraedi being scattered onto almost every habitable world in the galaxy as they abandoned damaged starships and started waiting for rescue that would never come. Some of those worlds would have biochemical factors close enough to Earth's that their inhabitants - once they had stumbled on to the whole 'sex' thing - eventually bred back to baseline human (kind of like how fancy koi end up looking like ordinary carp after a few generations), and others were harsher and so kept reinforcing the standard Zentraedi mods. The rest of the Zentraedi? Well, they kept fighting, on both sides, growing fewer and fewer, having less and less resources every millenium.
And in the meantime, the forgotten batch of psi-clones were breeding themselves and their potential out into the homeworld's genetic pool.
The SDF-1 started off as a command ship for the Others' relatively small original navy, and was converted for Zentraedi use when the war started going more and more badly, since the Others were very slow-breeding.
The Zentraedi have, say, three ship designs - a defense ship, which is a relatively small ship with a lot of anti-mecha guns, an attack ship, which is about the same size as its defensive counterpart but was built wrapped around a Big Fucking Gun, and a troop ship, which is ten times the size of either and quite lightly armed, except for the thousands and thousands of armored Zentran/Meltram warriors it can deploy at will. The Attack Ships, BTW, are quite rare - the Precursors didn't design them until after they first ran into the Others.
The SDF-1's original specs were fairly typical of Other ship design - large but agile for its size, massively armored, heavily armed, and insanely well-defended by both point-defense and energy shields. The Others used a lot more different ship types than the Zentraedi, but they were usually so flexible that the only real difference from one type to another was their weight class. Oh, yeah - and they liked spinal mounts.
Post-rebuild, the SDF-1 has lost about half of its reaction mass bunkerage (yes, Newton applies even for the elder races), a similar proportion of its secondary (ie, non-spinal) energy weapons, and all but the armor out of its defensive complement. However, the UN replaced and actually beefed up the flak guns and swapped around the remaining beam cannon for better coverage - then dumped heavy missile launchers in where the missing ones had been, which makes it a rather more dangerous proposition at long (ie, light-second-plus) range.
Neither of the Elder races had had much use for missiles, BTW, since, each for their own reasons, neither were very good at the computer technology needed for ECCM and such. Humans, OTOH, are, and so love the things.
Most of the UN's space navy at this point is made up of Active Response Mobile Defense platforms, which, rather than the brick-like things we saw in the original, rather resemble the Discovery from 2001, except for the massive rotating habitation carousel. Rather than a sphere, their bow section looks like the head of a sledgehammer - long axis parallel to that of the ship rather than perpendicular, BTW - and carries the ship's primary armarment of about a dozen very heavy missiles. (How heavy? One hit and a capital ship's toast heavy.) Add in about twice as many recoverable USVs and a fairly comprehensive CIWS system and there you are. Overall displacement, say, one to two hundred thousand tons.
Besides those ships, there are a considerable number of asteroid-based listening posts scattered across pretty much the entire solar system along with mostly-automated fuel depots at each of the gas giants' LaGrange points and water-mining operations on their moons.
The standard design for a UN Spacy space station is a central pod run through the center of a large structural ring (size as yet undetermined) and connected to same by a few narrow pylons. Grav sections have their hubs on either end of the central pod, and storage tanks, flight decks, or assorted other random crap gets bolted on around the rim of the ring - parallel to the central pod, BTW, not to the ring itself.
How big should the ring be? Well, just barely big enough to fit the SDF-1 through the middle of it...
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Way back at the dawn of time, the Precursors had a major, extremely powerful intragalactic empire. They were not, however, sufficiently powerful to feel themselves secure against all known or plausible threats, and so conducted extensive research into new weapons and technologies.
After playing around with robotics and such - which didn't work out just because they were Really Alien and couldn't conceptualize the problem in a way that could be solved cost-effectively, they started tinkering around with genetic engineering, trying to create a non-sapient soldier race who could nevertheless be smart enough to make effective warriors.
And it seemed to work, so they started cloning and outfitting defensive armies to do their fighting for them.
The reason they based their work off of humans was simple: It was more efficient to start with a sapient and work back than the other way around, and out of all the sapient races they had found, we hairless apes from Planet Earth had the simplest genetics - making us the best subjects for manipulation.
Then they ran into what they'd been afraid of all along. The Others had taken an entirely different approach to their military planning than the Precursors - they'd gone and developed psi as a science (pardon the pun).
If it hadn't turned out that the Precursors had been wrong about the intelligence of their Zentraedi minons - they were quite sapient, just so well-conditioned they usually didn't act it - then the Others could have taken control of their entire military and won handily. Instead, they only grabbed about half the fleet.
True to form, the Precursors looked at the problem and tried to engineer a life-form to solve it - in this case, by going back to their previous guinea pigs and trying to give them psi powers comperable to those they had observed the Others using to steal their troops... They didn't know about the amplifiers the Others were using, and in fact generally had no fucking clue what they were doing, but somehow they managed to get a 'working model' anyway. She wasn't near as strong as they'd have liked, but she was better than nothing, so they started a batch of clones at the research station and...
Then things got real ugly. When the dust had mostly settled, the galaxy looked rather different - the Precursors and the Others had wiped each other out entirely, and there were random fragments of Zentraedi being scattered onto almost every habitable world in the galaxy as they abandoned damaged starships and started waiting for rescue that would never come. Some of those worlds would have biochemical factors close enough to Earth's that their inhabitants - once they had stumbled on to the whole 'sex' thing - eventually bred back to baseline human (kind of like how fancy koi end up looking like ordinary carp after a few generations), and others were harsher and so kept reinforcing the standard Zentraedi mods. The rest of the Zentraedi? Well, they kept fighting, on both sides, growing fewer and fewer, having less and less resources every millenium.
And in the meantime, the forgotten batch of psi-clones were breeding themselves and their potential out into the homeworld's genetic pool.
The SDF-1 started off as a command ship for the Others' relatively small original navy, and was converted for Zentraedi use when the war started going more and more badly, since the Others were very slow-breeding.
The Zentraedi have, say, three ship designs - a defense ship, which is a relatively small ship with a lot of anti-mecha guns, an attack ship, which is about the same size as its defensive counterpart but was built wrapped around a Big Fucking Gun, and a troop ship, which is ten times the size of either and quite lightly armed, except for the thousands and thousands of armored Zentran/Meltram warriors it can deploy at will. The Attack Ships, BTW, are quite rare - the Precursors didn't design them until after they first ran into the Others.
The SDF-1's original specs were fairly typical of Other ship design - large but agile for its size, massively armored, heavily armed, and insanely well-defended by both point-defense and energy shields. The Others used a lot more different ship types than the Zentraedi, but they were usually so flexible that the only real difference from one type to another was their weight class. Oh, yeah - and they liked spinal mounts.
Post-rebuild, the SDF-1 has lost about half of its reaction mass bunkerage (yes, Newton applies even for the elder races), a similar proportion of its secondary (ie, non-spinal) energy weapons, and all but the armor out of its defensive complement. However, the UN replaced and actually beefed up the flak guns and swapped around the remaining beam cannon for better coverage - then dumped heavy missile launchers in where the missing ones had been, which makes it a rather more dangerous proposition at long (ie, light-second-plus) range.
Neither of the Elder races had had much use for missiles, BTW, since, each for their own reasons, neither were very good at the computer technology needed for ECCM and such. Humans, OTOH, are, and so love the things.
Most of the UN's space navy at this point is made up of Active Response Mobile Defense platforms, which, rather than the brick-like things we saw in the original, rather resemble the Discovery from 2001, except for the massive rotating habitation carousel. Rather than a sphere, their bow section looks like the head of a sledgehammer - long axis parallel to that of the ship rather than perpendicular, BTW - and carries the ship's primary armarment of about a dozen very heavy missiles. (How heavy? One hit and a capital ship's toast heavy.) Add in about twice as many recoverable USVs and a fairly comprehensive CIWS system and there you are. Overall displacement, say, one to two hundred thousand tons.
Besides those ships, there are a considerable number of asteroid-based listening posts scattered across pretty much the entire solar system along with mostly-automated fuel depots at each of the gas giants' LaGrange points and water-mining operations on their moons.
The standard design for a UN Spacy space station is a central pod run through the center of a large structural ring (size as yet undetermined) and connected to same by a few narrow pylons. Grav sections have their hubs on either end of the central pod, and storage tanks, flight decks, or assorted other random crap gets bolted on around the rim of the ring - parallel to the central pod, BTW, not to the ring itself.
How big should the ring be? Well, just barely big enough to fit the SDF-1 through the middle of it...
Ja, -n
===========
===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."